City Council Preview: Of Pedicabs and Charter Changes

It’s relatively light work for the Austin City Council today, what with a scant 40-item agenda and nary a single zoning item. Still there’s a few items of interest for intrepid council watchers.

Pedal Power: On the agenda are a couple of items regarding pedicabs, those ubiquitous, people-powered cabs pedaling all over Austin’s entertainment districts. The biggest change is a moratorium on new pedicab permits for six months.

Items 21 and 22 include new rules over how pedicabs can operate in the Sixth Street area. In addition to defining acceptable areas of operation, other possible changes include how customers may pay a pedicabber: both customers and pedicabs must form lines, and a customer may only hire the pedicab at the front of the line.

To expedite the changes, the city will also consider adding street markings to designate specific staging areas. The designated areas proposed lie within the Sixth Street Entertainment District, from the 200 block and 700 block of East Sixth street. and all crossroads between East Fifth and East Seventh streets.

City Charter, err, City Code Changes Afoot: Items 20 and 23 both pertain to recommendations issued by the 2012 Charter Election Committee. While the committee most famously grappled with the question of geographic representation, the group also issued several other recommendations.

Item 20 would place one such realignment before voters, where city council members would hire their own staffs (technically, they’re currently hired by the city manager).

Item 23 prepares several ordinances that council will consider at their April 26 meeting. Council members had previously discussed passing several such measures themselves instead of putting them before voters, as not to clutter up the ballot. They include:

Expanding the jurisdiction of the Ethics Review Commission to include campaign finance violations, requiring special reporting of campaign contributions made in the last 9 days before an election, enhancing reporting of independent expenditures in City elections, creating a campaign finance database, enhancing required reporting regarding bundlers of campaign contributions; and creating limits on the amounts of campaign contributions that may be bundled by lobbyists.

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Last night, the 2012 Charter Revision Committee narrowly voted to recommend a new form of government for the City of Austin – a city council comprised of members representing 10 individual districts, with only the mayor running city-wide.

So what’s next?

For starters, the committee isn’t completely finished yet. In a sign of the contentious nature of the 8-7 vote to recommend the “10-1” plan, the committee called for another meeting, to go over the language in the final recommendation it makes to council.

The Austin City Council held an initial discussion on sweeping reforms to local government this morning – reforms that may result in booting them all from City Hall.

The council discussed several recommendations from the 2012 Charter Revision Group. Many measures, largely campaign finance reforms, could be made simply by council action. Council member Laura Morrison suggested they start that work immediately, and put unresolved issues before the voters. “I would like to move forward as quickly as possible,” she said, “and see what results from there, and we still have the option to consider putting it on the ballot.”

One reason council members may make the changes themselves – instead of putting them before voters – is to streamline a cluttered ballot this November. They don’t want to distract voters from the biggest local change: a switch from Austin’s current form of elections, where all council members run citywide, to a form of geographic representation, where council members would run in and represent individual districts.

The Austin City Council meets tomorrow, but the real action may not be in council chambers.

The 2012 Charter Revision Committee is meeting tomorrow at City Hall. It’s being billed as the group's final meeting, and the committee’s expected to issue a recommendation on the most controversial topic it's discussed: changes to Austin’s form of elections.

The committee was created by the City Council to recommend changes to the City Charter, the city’s governing document. Its recommendations, if approved by the council, will then be put before voters this November in an election to change the charter.

As we’ve previously discussed, Austin council elections are currently at-large, meaning council members run in and represent the entire city. Critics charge this makes council candidacies prohibitively expensive, and doesn’t create equitable representation for all parts of Austin.